Posts Tagged ‘RHEL6’

I just got an email with the subject “Opportunity for Red Hat Certified Professionals to test new Red Hat software”.

Quoting the email:

" The new subscription management tools provide a very different user
experience than today’s Red Hat Network (RHN). We would like to get
your feedback on the software so that we can improve the tooling before
RHEL 6.1 is released. As part of this Beta Program, we will be offering
you a beta version Red Hat Enterprise Linux Personal Subscription. This
subscription will allow you to access the tooling that will be provided
as part of the RHEL 6.1 minor release."

In the same email Red Hat offers the audience to have up to 10 systems registered for free:

"Under the Personal Subscription provided via the Beta Program, users are able
to deploy the software on up to 10 personal systems. The Red Hat
Personal Subscriptions entitle you to access software and software
updates"

That are actually great news for us as Red Hat certified professionals. But it also opens new questions about the future of RHN, the RHN Satellite and the subscription model of Red Hat in general.

According to the documentation (You need to be at least RHCE and provide your RHCE number to get access to it), with RHEL6.1 registering systems to the RHN will completely change. No more rhn-register it is now the CLI command subscription-manager.

The most important thing that changed is that the username and password of RHN needs to be transmitted just once, afterwards you will get identified by a X509 client certificate.

The only drawback I’ve found was that the command to register a consumer needs to provide the password in clear text on the command line.

And for Satellite users?
As far as I can see, nothing changes, Satellite users can still provision the systems with activation keys, it is still channel based, not product based.

For enterprise users nothing is changing in the next time, the new entitlement and subscription method does only apply to does users NOT using a Satellite server, at least for now and for RHEL6.1.

The Readme also mentions RHN Satellte 5.5 which is not (yet) released. It is quite unclear what is expecting us with Satellite 5.5.

Reading some bugzilla entries, it is clear that there is still some time until RHN Satellite 5.5. will hit the road.

Please: A public Beta for RHN Satellite 5.5
Please Red Hat, provide a public, or at least a semi-public beta (like for RHEL6.1) release, to give your enterprise customers a chance to do the Q&A which was missing on the release of RHN Satellite 5.4.

Having fun? I do actually not care about RHN Network, I’m a Satellite user. Personally I’m having fun with my 10 personal RHEL6.1 subscriptions for free, it allows me to do lots of tests before putting RHEL6.1 into production.

Lines of code
Spacewalk has 2,908,841 lines of code, created in estimated 843 person years. This means 843 developers are needed to rewrite Spacewalk from scratch in one year! That’s amazing.

Number of bugs fixed
As stated in the post, the Spacewalk-team fixed 1012 bugs in the year 2010. Some 1061 bugs are still due to be solved, the Spacewalk-team will not running out of work in 2011. See RHN Satellite bugs and Spacewalk bugs.

Contributions from outside Red Hat
96% of the contributions are from Red Hat people. Looks like my small contribution to the German translation is just about 0.0000001% ;-). Seriously: This should be improved. More people outside of Red Hat should contribute. How? A good way can be a better support for Debian based distributions as well as for SLES/OpenSUSE and other distributions. I think this would attracting more Red Hat outsiders.

Another important thing: Instead of mailing list posts, Fedora should release its advisories similar to Red Hat. This would enable people to have the errata in its Spacewalk servers. This would lead into more people interested in Spacewalk in the Fedora community.

Communications
The IRC communication stats can somehow be a bit problematic. Is it really needed to log all IRC traffic? Its was stated that 24.1% have been questions, the mail list post also disclosed which are the most aggressive persons and so on. Privacy? For myself: I’m probably going to change my real name nick to something else…

Missing numbers
It would be interesting how many people are subscribed to the spacewalk and spacewalk-devel mailing lists and the number of posts to these lists.

Major achievements in 2010
This is just my point of view…

– PostgreSQL support reached a point where it is ready for broad testing.
– spacewalk-repo-sync allows to directly sync with yum repos.
– Staging of content
– Support for eliminating duplicate system profiles
– Performance improvements (felt, not measured)

Did I had fun this year?
I had a lot of fun with Spacewalk, for sure. I did not challenged Spacewalk with all the stuff that I need @work with the RHN Satellite.

Will I have fun in 2011?
With Spacewalk of course, it is a cool project. If the Fedora project decides to publish Spacewalk-like erratas I’m pretty sure that France will have a problem to produce the amount of Champagne needed. If it comes down to the RHN Satellite: Due to severe bugs, I only can manage RHEL6 systems with some workarounds but I am confident that this will change soon.

RHEL6 was just released at 2010-11-10 20:09:50 CET. Quoting Red Hat press relase: Today, we delivered Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 to the market. @Red Hat: you are so mean! Next time inform your fellows one day in advance to give your fellows the chance to fill the fridges with champagne!

I did not checked (yet) the differences between beta 2.1 and GA. I guess the differences are at a minimum.

The odd thing is: It seems not be available via satellite-sync yet (yes, sat540 is in place).

[update]You need to get a new certificate from Red Hat support to get access to the rhel6 channels, regardless if you got one a few days ago to install sat540.[/update]

First of all: Where is the Red Hat Press release? Nada, nothing, nichts (yet)….

History
As I wrote in my previous post, I’ll keep you posted with my latest findings.

In another post, I was speculating about the upstream version. Now, Sat540 seems to be based on Spacewalk 1.2 which is not yet released. I was quite puzzled about that fact. Usually upstream (Fedora) projects are ahead of its commercial counterparts, this time it seems to be the other way round.

Major Features
I was quite guessing right on the expected new features:

RHEL6 Support (SHA-256 Checksums on RPMs)

Support for importing and syncing of external yum repositories

Find duplicate entitlements of systems

Oracle 11g support

Recording of the install-date of packages

Additionally the following features have been added:

Symlink Support in the configuration management

SELinux in configuration management

Flex Guests enhancements

In contrary to my expectations:

For the moment, Sat540 runs only on RHEL5, thus meaning Tomcat5

Cobbler
The included version of Cobbler is 2.0.7. In EPEL5 it is 2.0.3, in EPEL5-test as well as in Fedora 14 beta it is 2.0.5. At least in sat540 it is the same version as in EPEL6-Beta, 2.0.7. The cobbler git repository mentions cobbler 2.1.0. At FUDCon in Zurich I was talking to some Red Hat guys. They told me: The cobbler guy left Red Hat. Hmmm… What is going on?

Real tests and improvements
I was not yet able to install sat540 yet, I’m waiting for the certificate… Nevertheless I made some tests with Spacewalk 1.1 which have been very promising.

At work
Today @work, I just prepared the staging/test satellite for being upgraded from 5.3 to 5.4. I’m still waiting for the new certificate from the Red Hat support. This brings me to another question: Why the heck is a new certificate needed? That’s boring…

As soon as I get the certificate from Red Hat, I’m going to upgrade the Staging/Test Satellite @work, so you can expect more detailed reports soon.

The latest unofficial rumors about the release date of RHEL6 are pointing to end of October 2010. This is a bit more precise than the official statement “later this year“.

There are multiple sources of this rumors, so it can be considered truthful but still not as a fact. Hopefully RHN Satellite 5.4 will be released end of September to prepare the infrastructure to be able to manage RHEL6.